Published
Mon, Jul 6, 2020, 17:50
- In a bid to redress racial injustice in the music industry, the Swedish manufacturer will redirect at least 15 percent of future sales.
Swedish hardware company Teenage Engineering is launching a revenue-share scheme for Black and POC artists in a bid to combat racial injustice in the music industry.
As of September 1st, four US acts—Underground Resistance, Suzi Analogue, VoltageCtrlR and Baseck—will be the first to benefit from the programme, which will redirect at least 15 percent of sales revenue when US customers use special links to the company's website, The New York Times reports. The artist contracts are still being drawn up.
The scheme, which Teenage Engineering is calling "artist fellowships," is a way of compensating the communities responsible for creating electronic music, many of which have been failed by the industry and its systemic inequalities. Emmy Parker, the company's chief brand officer, estimates that the artists' share could be anything between $100,000 and a million dollars a year.
"This will allow us to make a shift in the economic model immediately," she told the Times.
Teenage Engineering isn't the only music company to be spurred into action by recent events in the US and beyond. On June 19th, AKA Juneteenth, Bandcamp donated its portion of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Read more about the online retailer's social justice strategy in Matt McDermott's recent feature.